Purple Bamboo Chinese School

here was hardly and still is any good quality education available here for foreigners. This is why we started innovating and changing this status quo. Most importantly, through years of experience, thorough research and passion for excellence, we developed a method we strongly believe in. What is our teaching method? Everybody knows that traditional Chinese education system has serious drawbacks as it is examination-oriented, putting a lot of focus on memorization, thus not helping out much with daily life language. Foreigners’ main goal when learning Chinese is hassle-free communication and the ability to handle day to day issues, and topics. Moreover, Western education system considerably differs from the Chinese one. All of those reasons make it quite a struggle to learn Mandarin at most institutions in China, full of grammar repetition, and learning great amount of words and phrases that are not exactly the most useful ones to be used on a street of Beijing or Shanghai. Helping students learn and remember words, and using them in sentences that have context specific to them was our starting point when forming Purple Bamboo’s teaching method. We also started from a firm standpoint that an effective communication and mastering a language is primarily related to listening and speaking rather than reading and writing. Thus, we decided to make bold changes to the way we teach Chinese, partly drawing inspiration from Laozi’sTao Te Ching, we decided to teach without books, let students truly understand the meaning behind every word, show them easy ways to extend vocabulary, and make it a fun experience all together. Common Chinese learning problems such as focusing too much on HSK and not being able to communicate well with fellow Beijingers, or not being able to sit tests by working too much on the spoken Mandarin, won’t bother you. That’s because we have accumulated a lot of knowledge from our 4-year experience and countless discussions with students, and we have come up with a way to perfect your HSK score and have no problems effectively speaking Chinese. We combine the two by using pragmatic topics, with real-life situations, real-life testing, video classes, travelling opportunities, and at the same time solid explanation of words, phrases, and concepts. Our method is custom-made as we want to accommodate different levels of our students. Our motto is that communication comes from experience. We hope that more and more students will find our method suitable for them and that more and more teachers would teach Chinese in this way. Why are we called Purple Bamboo? When we were starting back in 2009 we had several discussions with our students about how to call our school. We were sure that it had to represent modern Beijing and be strongly related to China. In the end, our student Jen came up with an idea we all liked: Purple Bamboo. Purple colour has a strong presence in traditional Chinese culture as it often comes up in names, and phrases such as in the old name of the Forbidden City, which was literally called Purple Forbidden City. Another example is of the purple air that comes to the east (紫气东来), which meant that a person found luck. Moreover, the colour represented the nobility back in the days. Similarly, Bamboo has a long history here as it was first used by Chinese people five to six thousand years ago in the Neolithic Age. During the ancient Shang dynasty people inscribed characters on bamboo sheets. Spring and Autumn period (770-476 BC) brought the invention of bamboo paper. The use of bamboo has been continually changing as generations were passing on this practical knowledge from father to son. Purple bamboo as a plant has outstanding vitality and a great dose of vigour, and that is what we want to transfer into our field - education. We are still relatively new, but we are in a constant search of new ways to enhance our method. We are also actively listening to feedback, comments, suggestions, criticism that is directed at us, our competitors, and industry as a whole. Our aim is to become a leader in our market and we will not stop our hard work and a great deal of fun with this project before reaching that goal. We hope that our growth will be accompanied by the spread of Chinese culture around the World. We also hope that our image and reputation will let us guide ever-growing number of foreigners to understand the past, and the undergoing change of China. What are our values? In our recruiting process and on a day to day basis we are making our best to form a team of teachers that share ambitions and aspirations, all possess noble virtues, and are in constant self-criticism, self-change and self-improvement cycle. Teaching is a great responsibility and we believe that only with an appropriate attitude and a careful attention to student’s needs we can deliver an excellent teaching experience. We would not be satisfied by only helping international community get a grasp of Mandarin as we also hope for instilling a long-lasting appreciation and passion for Chinese culture.